


golden child, lion boy

by busyyhead



Series: golden child, lion boy [1]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Bestiality, Coming Out, Growing Up, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busyyhead/pseuds/busyyhead
Summary: He is a king without his kingdom, a boy without a mother or father, and no real goal anymore.
Relationships: Aslan/Peter Pevensie, Peter Pevensie/Original Male Character(s)
Series: golden child, lion boy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1919740
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	golden child, lion boy

He puts on his uniform and goes to school like a normal boy and gets into fights, and it feels like a lie.

The clothes, not the fighting, though he's sure that Aslan wouldn't approve of the fighting either, and that just compounds it.

He's older now, his hair is longer, and he hides his scars. He's Peter and nobody, he's a normal _boy_ , like any of the kids at that school, and it feels like a lie.

(He wasn’t _always_.)

And he knows he's never going back, this is his world, he's just Peter, glory-hungry but not a king.

He knows this, he _does_.

But in his head, he remembers, what the forest had tasted like as he walked through it. Entire afternoons spent communing with the trees. How the light had looked cast off the crest of a wave on the shores of his home. How all of his people had worshiped him, not as their king of prophecy, but as the fair, strong young man they crowned him for.

But when he looks at himself in the mirror, at the silver line running down his arm, _this_ feels like a lie too.

*  
  


Sometimes he thinks he could go back. If he'd never found Narnia, had never felt the searing pain of claws ripping through his skin, and hadn't unsheathed his sword and killed the wolf with it.

*  
  


He and Susan fight and then Lucy is yelling and so is Edmund and so is he and they’re all digging deeper than Peter feels comfortable with.

 _Who are you angry at_? they ask, and he is cornered and angry and doesn’t know, w _ho are you angry at_? And—he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know, it’s no one and everyone and everything and nothing, and it’s Susan and Edmund and even Lucy and Aslan, all those goddamn people at school, and it’s none of them and it’s all of them.

*  
  


It's hard to remember that his life is what it is. Hard to remember Edmund's death and Narnia's curse. Harder to remember the dozens of happy memories in the space of a life previous.

*  
  


They're at the train station and he's watching boys that look so put-together board the train, and Susan is saying something about _college_ and _political science_ , and Peter is staring at the boy on the bench, the one with the green eyes and golden-brown curls who's cheekbones keep drawing his eyes.

Peter looks away after he himself is being noticed by the other boy.

*  
  


He dreams of water, of drowning, dreams of wolves snarling and biting and colliding with his chest. He wakes, heart thumping, with tears in his lashes and pain in his arm worse than any blade pushing in.

Edmund blinks a him in the half dark, his lashes as wet as Peter's own.

*  
  


He never believed lions were kind, but he never forgets the feeling of a sword in his schoolboy hands or how Aslan's roar stirred something wild beneath his skin, the same sort of fearlessness that had propelled him to plunge his sword through the wolf.

*  
  


“ _I don't really want to go home,” he says when they're alone and walking on the surf._

_Going back means never seeing their home again and listening to the bombs falling outside and going back to being normal._

_Logically, he knows they'll have to go back, but god, he doesn't want that._ _He wants this as long as he can._

_Aslan doesn't question it, just like Peter knew he wouldn't._

_He looks out at the dappled sunrise-gold water, the sea bluer than a thousand sapphires. Cair Paravel, aloft the cliffs, is a dusky peach._

_Aslan is a lion, so Peter doesn't really care about being naked in front of him. He loves swimming, feeling the water flowing past him, never tiring. He swims out as far as he can, watching a couple of merfolk swim by and bow their heads to him._

_Aslan naps curled up on the dark grey disk of the shadows. Peter clambers back up onto the beach and flops into the sand by his side. Grains of sand cling wetly to his gold-tan skin, the morning sun yellowing his soaked hair._

_Aslan lowers his head to his lap, deliberate. Peter puts his hand in his mane, carding his fingers through it. He once found Aslan likes it, because his chest will rumble and his blinks will go slow._

_Peter swallows and lick the salt from his teeth. Tastes the ocean, deep and cool._

_He lays on his back, closing his eyes._ _Neither of them speak, but they welcome the excuse to not to talk whilst drying off, right until Aslan tells him it's time._

*  
  


Autumn's chilly tendrils worm their way under his clothes, even on the train. Peter shivers and draws closer to Edmund's warm body next to his.

“Look, Pete. Isn't that one from your class?” Edmund declares suddenly.

Peter doesn't need to look up to know it is Thomas. He's already recognized the scuff of his shoes across the floor.

The other boy raises his hand in greeting. Peter can feel his cheeks reddening, and he rakes his hands through his hair, shuffling his feet a little.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is,” he says hurriedly, grabbing his bag where he'd put it down and practically running out.

*  
  


Lucy looks miserable here, almost as miserable as Peter is.

He wonders what's worse: not having a real home or having one you can never go back to.

*  
  


As nice as it is to find out that Thomas is a decent guy, it's not reassuring to find that he seems to move faster than Peter in most things.

The metal slide-lock on the stall door moves back and the door swings open. Thomas bolts it again behind him.

“So, two fags in a bathroom stall. Pretty sure I've heard that one before.”

The stall door rattles as their combined weights fall against it, his arms around Thomas' neck.

“Oh god,” Peter says, and when Thomas pauses to fumble with the buttons, he says, “Someone's going to be barging in here any second.”

Before he can lose his nerve he surges forward again, pressing his lips against Thomas'.

*  
  


It's kind of tacky.

“Watch where you're going, fag,” one of the boys says, his elbow connecting hard with Peter's rib as they pass each other in the station, and that's that.

Six minutes later they're at the center of a ring of students from their class.

The boy's knuckles make contact with Peter's lower lip, making the skin split and making Peter's yell sound harsh and raw. The other boy's right ear is already looking all puffy and red and they've both lost a couple of buttons on their uniform.

“Fag,” the boy says again, and Peter thinks for the first time about what that word might actually mean.

*  
  


He can't even remember stepping onto the beach: it's like he just stepped from one dream right into another.

The daylight is too bright to be anything but real.

He wonders if he's dreaming. Edmund's hand is still cold from the autumn chill. Peter considers letting go, but he's afraid if he does, the beach will fall away again, he won't be able to get it back.

*  
  


Cair Paravel lies as a ruin on the sea. It always felt bigger than the actual limits of a physical building. It's still the same. The air, the smell, the light over the waves, but it feels empty, absent, silent.

*  
  


Three hundred years. There are parts of the land that have been built on which hadn't been touched by human hands before. It took too long for them to come back.

Peter's eyes feel as if pricked. Aslan is gone, their friends are eternally sleeping, their home lost to them.

*  
  


He dives into the water and pulls the dwarf to the surface. He doesn't expect gratitude, and Trumpkin doesn't offer it to him.

*  
  


He dreams of Aslan.

When he lifts his arm to rub his eyes he finds the white scar on it, and Aslan laps at it and it fades away like it was never there.

_You're letting shame decide who you are._

He's not sure if it's Aslan who really said it, or if it's his own voice echoing back to him.

*  
  


He wakes up to the cooling ashes of the fire. Aslan isn't completely gone as he opens his eyes, but he fades away quickly when he sees Lucy tucked under his arm, even though she's too big for it now, and he cards his fingers through her hair and whispers that everything is going to be alright.

“He was real,” she murmurs against his throat, squeezing her eyes shut so he can't see the tears there.

*  
  


“Are you alright?” Susan asks in her soft, early-morning voice.

He knows she's just trying to sound unworried for his sake.

“Not really. I mean, it's normal, at least by our standards.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“I like boys. Too.”

It's not as horrible as he thought it would be. Saying it out loud.

It feels right. The same way kissing Thomas had felt right.

“Oh,” she says. Just _oh_ , and then, “I thought so.”

He didn't need to tell her, but the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes it was never going to be anyone else.

*  
  


Peter is yelling, raging. He unsheathes his sword and presses it to Caspian's throat, and means it.

 _I'm not the one who abandoned Narnia_.

Anger sits in his chest, but it's the like which he hasn't felt since he watched Edmund die. The anger in his chest screams for Miraz, for his body limp and still on the ground. He may have an army, but Peter has his sword, has hot, unadulterated rage that once had trumped the witch's cold blood.

*  
  


 _You know you can't do this alone_.

He feels rage unfurling in his chest, following the tug on the cold fingers around his heart, when the ice shatters into a thousand pieces.

He's a weak child, still a naive boy.

*  
  


When he is able to focus and not the pain in his shoulder, which clicks angrily, he lets out a rasping growl from deep in his chest. It startles Miraz, and Peter pivots forward, toppling the other man to the ground, and his sword as well.

He's won. Hands are thrown upward, a bitter surrender.

Peter is walking away.

Stronger than him, Miraz lifts his sword at him, at his turned back, and Peter just gets his sword up in time to impale the man under his armor. The steel shines with blood as it pierces through the other side.

The cut is as deep as roots, and the weapon that makes it is spear-sharp, blade-bright.

*  
  


His muscles still ache from the fray, but half-way into the river he sees Lucy ( _alive_ , all of the are amazingly, incredibly alive) and Aslan is next to her, and the sight of them tugs at Peter's heart like a kite string.

*  
  


After, when they've taken the weapons of the Telmarines coming out of the river. After, when their dead have been buried. After, when Peter has watched Caspian and Susan kiss when they think no one's watching, he says nothing as Aslan walks beside him through the halls, says nothing as Aslan offers nothing in return.

Aslan just flicks his ear at him, and just like that Peter runs his hand across the lion's vast head, thumbing along the edge of his ear.

“I wish you'd found us sooner,” he says, and his voice doesn't shake, but it's a close thing. “I've missed this.”

“So have I, Peter Pevensie.”

He still thinks Aslan's attention is too precious a resource to waste on him, but his fingers in Aslan's mane tighten.

*  
  


He wades barefoot through the burbling water. The trees' branches stir lazy brushstrokes in the warm, rain-scented wind. The water ripples when Aslan advances on him, the river flowing around him and leaving him dry.

Peter retreats.

He backs up against a tree, pressing his spine against it, a boy retreating before a lion's advance.

They tussle on the river bank. Peter's shoulder blades dig into the cool dirt as Aslan presses him into the ground, shaking with early morning laughter.

There's a thrashing in his chest, a warm mass of pleasure and sinew thumping under curving ribs when his hands settle on Aslan's chest.

He has had many dreams about this moment. Some of them when he was still a boy in love with magic and a lion full of magic and sunny days swimming in the ocean, almost endearing in their simplicity, in the blind devotion he had for Aslan then.

*  
  


He lays himself out before him, baring his stomach, his throat, his neck. Parts his thighs to receive him, riding Aslan with cautious lifts, falls, rolls of his hips, never going faster no matter how much Aslan growls and snarls and his claws leave marks in the dirt.

*  
  


Peter is a king, a lion, a thing made golden under Aslan's touch, real and strong and _here_. A fearless thing, a thing to be held onto, a thing that fights and wins and protects and saves.


End file.
